I wonder if at some point it would just make sense to have a split between commercial and non-commerical web. Chrome could become just an app you use to do things like banking and online shopping, while Firefox could be a browser you use to access things like the Fediverse.

[–] PP44@lemmy.ml 6 points 2 years ago

Interesting take, never thought of this that way but it seems really realistic the way you put it ! That is already happening with mail where the big mail servers start to "defederate" by straight up denying mail from servers they do not recognize. Maybe the day will come where web servers will just send data to recognized browser (already kind of happening)

But what frighten me is hardware discrimination. In the name of security, I think we may soon come to the point where some servers will discriminate against "non-verified hardware".

[–] Ephera@lemmy.ml 4 points 2 years ago (1 children)

Some people are kind of already living that romance with the Gemini protocol. So, that's separate from the whole HTTP/HTML web and you need a Gemini browser to access it. The markup language is rather similar to Markdown, so the fanciest tech you have available, are images and ASCII art. Which is pretty hostile to advertising.

As far as I could tell, if you enjoy reading blog posts, this is actually quite a cozy little corner of the internet.

[–] yogthos@lemmy.ml 7 points 2 years ago

Yeah, Gemini is an interesting experiment and completely agree it's a very good solution for text based static content. Protocol being restrictive ends up being a feature in this context.

[–] fu@libranet.de 1 points 2 years ago (1 children)

@yogthos @PP44 I'm not sure how old you are, but it wasn't too long ago that they said the same thing about Microsoft in general and IE specifically (If Irecall correctly IE for Mac was the default browser for like MacOS 8 or 9)

All it takes is someone to be innovative and different. After Netscape opened their code the Mozilla project took off like lightning and by the time I was in College Firefox was the default for most, than Google did Chrome and things where speedier than Firefox and we are where we are, and Firefox seems to be interested primarily being developed from privacy/security focused users. I don't think there are actually that many people in that space, and that space also has overlap with folks who wouldn't want to use Firefox due to preferring the type of security provided by the Tor Browser over the Tor Network.

I'm not sure what the next step will be, I feel like current hardware/infrastructure probably means that speed improvements for browsers aren't going to be the primary driving force for changes in the market here, but someone somewhere will come with an innovative solution to change items.

[–] PP44@lemmy.ml 1 points 2 years ago

Let's hope you are right. I agree that things can change, but I have to admit I'm quite worried.